Learnings

"Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" by Jeff Sutherland

I've heard about Scrum by my brother when I was working at The Marketing Store. I was trying to figure out how to organize the creative process and how to make it more visual, so that everyone could have the overview of the whole process, and not just a single part of it. I thought only in this way we could make everybody feel part of the whole job, and consequently the team would walk together for a common goal. And I discovered that's what Scrum is about.

Jeff Sutherland created Scrum in 1993 to improve the development of softwares. He was tired of a lot of companies and teams creating a lot of diagrams to plan the whole project that nobody would follow or fulfill. Billions of dollars were wasted because the team developed a product that nobody would used, or that didn't make sense anymore after 2 years of delay. People filling hundreds of documents that nobody would read it instead of talking to each other and working together in a collaborative way.

Jeff tells that companies, after implement Scrum, registered increase of productivity up to 400%. Companies from different areas like Google, Microsoft, Nike, Itaú, and even FBI are using this method. Yesterday I watched a talk from Google and they were telling about how they organize the development process in design sprints, and how this contributes to them to test really quickly the ideas and to make mistakes earlier so they can correct them as soon as possible - instead of waste a huge amount of time developing something that doesn't attend the expectations of the users. This is one of main principles of Scrum - divide the process in small sprints so that you can always have something of value in your hands and test with people if you are going in the right direction.

There are other simple principles like transform the whole process in something visual to everyone, making a Scrum board showing the progress of the work, so everybody can have a macro view of the whole project and see where they need to put more effort or help the others. Another principle is to have constantly feedback in each sprint - not only from the users or clients, but the process itself. In each sprint, the team members can talk to each other where they had more difficult or what disturbed their productivity, and them they can correct it or try something new in the next sprint.

You can check on internet how to implement Scrum really quickly in your team, but I highly recommend for you to read the book. There, Jeff explain each principle of the method and why it works, giving a lot of examples from different companies in how he managed to implement Scrum in each case. It's cool that a lot of things that Sutherland says is really close to what I've been reading about design thinking and other stuffs - about how to transform the organizations more creative and innovative by working in a collaborative way.